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User blog:LittleIslander/Wiki-Wide: On Categories, with Notes on Deletion
Another step towards both acuracy and professionalism is, of course, is an organized and useful categorization system. There are at least a few problems with how categories are handled on Cryptid Wiki. I hope to address some of these here and put in some guidelines on how to and how not to decide what categories an article belongs to. For the first thing requiring addressing: Relevance. As per usual, an example shall be give. This time, the article I'll use is the Ambize article. I have just removed four cateogories from this article, which incentivized me to finally touch on this subject that I've been wanting to talk about for a little bit now. If you are curious about this case specifically, or want further explanation, see the first note at the bottom of this post (if no such note exist, it shall be added later, chedck back soon!). There are two common practices in what I would call incorrect use of categories that I'll address first. One of them is completely indefensible, the other I would highly discourage, but it's prescence on this wiki or lack thereof is not my choice as much as that of longer standing admins. But enough rambling, I'll get on to what these problems actually are now: Firstly is less a problem as much as a demand for common sense. In the example article, I removed the category "Humanoid". I presume this was added because the creature supposedly has human-like hands. This is just blatantly an incorrect use of the word. The word "Humanoid" refers to something with more or less the same bipedal shape as a human. Not necessarily related to humans, but it has to look roughly the same. Seeing as ambize is an aquatic fish-shaped creature, no shape of hands makes it fit into the category. I shouldn't have to say this, but if an article is not relevant to a category, don't put it inside it. Check what the category is relating to, and use common sense. Additionally, when editing an article, I'd reccomend taking a look at the categories to make sure that they all fit, and remove ones that don't. Second is less cut and clear, but it also is somewhat common sense. I mostly see this when it comes to classification of what type of animal the cryptid is, but, if a cryptid is not confirmed or very likely to be a certain type of animal, then don't put it in the category for that animal. So, a hypothetical sasquatch page would be put in the hypothetical category "Primates", but the ambize would NOT be put in the hypothetical category fish, like it was before I removed it, as mentioned above and below. Why? Since there's nothing specifically suggesting that it's a fish. Even if it's been suggested that a hypothetical cryptid is, say, a cat, you wouldn't put it in that category if that identification is disputed to a notable degree. ---- This blog post is largely unfinished, but I figure I'll rush out what's already written. Further updates to this blogpost elaborating on the given points and giving more insight on categorization will come soon. Category:Blog posts